Welcome to Acerbia; population: π
This is the archive of the many and fabulous adventures of . Like a hard-bitten son of Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius taught to write by William S. Burroughs; continually reincarnated, debated over by intellectuals and literati at cocktail parties the author can't get invited to, the target of scorn and ire from women everywhere, frequently mistaken for a former member of the Warsaw pact, named after the Italian explorer Giuseppe Acerbi, slowly rewriting the Book of Cataclysm, this is postmodern fiction at its most playful and creative.
Insert Backbeat
Further evidence if any was needed that this place is winding down; it took me four attempts to get the login URL right, nevermind the login details.
It seemed strange to realise that I didn't recognise anyone in the UK top 20 chart. I can remember a time when my life was soundtracked religiously to Cat Deeley enthusing each chart position, the movers and climbers and watching the flashy videos. Music as visuals had more appeal to me and still does, which is perhaps why when MTV Europe rolled over and died and the corpse was raped by a thousand mobile phone icon and ringtone providers I still couldn't face picking and sticking with a radio station of similar cred.
Whereas for a while I was on the pulse, and then for a longer time after that I was discovering on my own, I have discovered that I am now a mainstream consumer of music in that when an anthem blasts out of an Intel commercial for instance I think "gosh, I wonder who that is" instead of branding the New Young Pony Club as insta-sell-outs. I have just ordered their album over Amazon because I want a physical copy.
The last album I bought, I bought because I had been lucky enough to procure tickets to their stadium gig. Have they become so popular since I first heard them on MTV that they now fill stadiums? Apparently so, I guess I dozed off at some point and missed their mid-sized fans-only gigs. The last stadium gig I went to was The Rolling Stones at Twickenham. Their final gig according to them. My mother told me the story of going to their final gig in the late seventies at Parc des Princes in Paris. They pretty much played the same set I think.
I used to consume music, now I hoard it and wear it out. There's more music on my portable device than I could listen to in a week and still vaste swathes of it goes unlistened to, its just there as museum piece. Yay, verilly did I own once upon a time the complete Shag Times, both LPs, and I have the mp3s to prove it. Whenceforth might the vinyls themselves have gone? Fucked if I know, they didn't last the millenium.
Speaking of the works of Bill Drummond, I received "45" as a birthday present, in which he speaks about recording Echo and the Bunnymen tracks in the same month that I was born. God that makes me feel old. And stale. I like the man in the same way that I like Alan Moore; they've both managed to do what I would like to be able to do but I shirk at the thought of going through the difficulties necessary to get there. My playlist throws up Primal Scream and I ought to feel Indie and maybe seventeen again, but I don't. I'm not looking to feel young again, I have just started to understand the look adults used to give me when I would say "you don't know who Suede are?!"
Through fortuitous coincidence I encountered a blast from the past, a track that opened an obscure Jude Law film called Shopping by the Sabres of Paradise and it was like finding a twenty quid note in a pocket of a jacket you haven't worn in years. It also produced the clinging desperation of a man who finds a piece of flotsam in an ocean far from home; yes, I know this, this is good music, surely? I questioned my peers and some glazed over and remembered student squats or shared flats somewhere and smelly pizza and weed, yes, they confirmed, that was good music. Nobody I know listens to chart music anymore.
I Am Entertained
Warning, post contains spoilers about I Am Legend, both the book and the recent Will Smith movie.
I saw this last night, I'd been looking at it with lustful desire tinged with realistic disappointment that it couldn't possibly be good for some years, since reading a very old script for it that turned the third act into an escape through a ruined city in converted buses, which I am fairly certain was recycled into the finale of the Zack Snyder Dawn of the Dead remake.
Eschatology is something of a passing flirtatious entertainment genre with me; in that I adore bleak survivalist post-apocalyptical scenarios with plucky heroes single-handedly defeating zombie hordes but make it too real like Threads and I actually have a minor mental breakdown. When The Wind Blows also gave me problems.
But damn it, I Am Legend was a fabulous book and for the first hour and a bit of the latest movie adaptation I was absorbed, besotted, adoring of the scriptwriter who had managed to cram so much in. The visuals were perfect (if scientifically implausible) and the atmosphere, the tense solitary existence with only a dog for companionship, only to have the surrounding horrors revealed once we have bought in to this lone existence.
My issue is that Neville is a scientist, and upon noticing and discovering abherent behavior in what he himself has termed as a complete societal breakdown when the leader of the vampires not only bellows in protest but then sets up an identical trap for him, displaying intelligence, creativity, an understanding of Neville's painful lonliness, why God is it then played down into a blip in the plot?!
The lynchpin to returning the movie to the brilliance of the book would be to give the leader dialogue, make the other vampire's chatter and screams coherent enough for us to pick out words as they attack the house, and then in the lab beneath the house, trapped with glass between them explain that the woman and child were exactly what Ruth was in the book; a vampire able to control her lust and with the appearance of a normal human (since we never see her exposed to sunlight I don't see this as being too difficult) sent to infiltrate his laboratory.
The vampire's motivation is that they want to stop Neville experimenting on them, they've accepted their lot, they're terrified of this monster who attacks them during the day, drags them off, kills them slowly and painfully with his serums and keeps polaroids of his victims on the wall. Then Neville becomes the legend he is supposed to be in the title.
Hollywood, should you somehow be listening, it wouldn't even need expensive reshoots. All Smith needs to contribute are reaction shots as his hypocrisy is exposed, his betrayal at the hands of a woman and child that he has latched onto; he's been outsmarted. And when he offers a cure, to be turned down and told that all they want is to create their own society and live in peace, without the fear of the day stalker killing them off one by one, that would provide a far more effective and powerful message; that when the status quo shifts and you don't keep up, you have become obsolete and should not fight tooth and claw to return the world to the way it was.
The film is so close to being that good and true to the book, without a cop-out hopeful upbeat ending that it really did leave me cold that they missed the chance to give the vampires a voice. Also, some tiny bit of information regarding the liquid he keeps poyuring everywhere would be especially helpful, since its left unsaid whether its the garlic solution Neville uses in the book. Calling them night stalkers or dark stalkers or whatever they called them, sorry 28 Days Later already used that trick by calling their super-zombies "Infected", second time around its just not going to work. Why not call them... oh, I dunno, vampires?
Interruption In Service
Y'know, I think this site is winding down and probably soon to come to a complete stop; I couldn't remember my password.
Mondegreen
I'll never forget when she moved in close and whispered into my ear "there's a heaven above you, baby"
I'd been singing the wrong lyrics the entire time we'd been dancing.
Writer's block
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Written without the assistance of paste and quote.